


the bends

by cherubique



Series: amicitia - when everyone lives [5]
Category: Oxenfree (Video Game)
Genre: Brotherly Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Protective Older Brothers, Protective Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 17:09:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20660744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherubique/pseuds/cherubique
Summary: In some loops, Alex is the one who drowns, instead of Michael.He's still haunted by the sight of her, face down in the water- feels an inexplicable kinship with Jonas and Ren, the only two who understood his loss: who know why he jumps at the sound of radio static, turns his face away from teal hair dye, and weeps over folded linen napkins.Everything's alright now, Alex is sitting beside him, as keenly alive as she ever was- but ghosts have a way of lingering.





	the bends

Michael isn’t the same after the accident. 

It goes beyond the initial grief- there’s something about him that’s been dimmed, some quality that’s slightly off. Camena’s golden boy has lost his shine: the smile that came so readily has been scrubbed off. His shoulders roll forwards, slumped over into himself, hands crammed deep into his pockets. He doesn’t look up much, these days- absorbed in the grit of the ground beneath his fraying sneakers and the letterman jacket that seems an empty echo back to his golden-boy era. The zipper’s askew. He picks at the threads of his sleeves, pulls the fabric raw. He’s coming undone, leaving behind pieces of himself in the past, scattered like crumpled up receipts and bits of lint from the dustiness of the dryer.

The family tries to live around the absence of Alex. This grates at him more than anything else. Michael still sets out her place at the dinner table, folding her linen napkin into a little shape- usually a little swan, a tiny paper boat, a crumpled up heart. She used to love these. Alex would put the tiny boat on his head like a makeshift hat and laugh hysterically about it- especially when it nearly tipped off and he had to keep it propped up lightly with his fingers. 

It’s a tiny tradition the two of them have- had, ever since he learned how to mimic the shapes out of a thick book that’d been collecting dust on the bookshelves since he was seven. She’d been the one to draw his attention to it, pulling it down with a thump- falling backwards onto the ground, arms wrapped around the book. Heart leaping into his throat, making sure that she was alright- Michael had nearly keeled over, while she’d grinned widely. Alex had held the book out to him with both hands and asked him to check out the ‘wizard’s book,’ the edges of the pages gilded and the cover linen, in Prussian blue. He’d spent nights leafing through, the tiny flashlight on his keychain trailing across, a little wobbly- crookedly held underneath the covers. Whether his father had ever caught onto the fact that he was up late reading, Michael had never really known for sure. Even if he had- he’d never said anything, which was very much so typical of the man.

Michael is fastidious about the folding, meticulous about recreating moments from summers spent with her, suntanning and lounging on the edge of the water as she’d lazily look up from flipping through water frilled magazines to cheer for him as he splashed through in lazy circles. Alex never really liked swimming, she’d leave that to him- ironically doing the royal wave, smiling with her eyes half lidded and mouth crooked. They used to launch paper boats off of the pier together after he was done his laps, watch them bob and circle before capsizing. 

Sometimes Ren would be there, dropping in little paper cranes that he’d set on fire for a ‘proper viking funeral,’ crouched down with the flames lighting up his face. Michael always had to remind him to throw the matches into the boats, rather than trying to set them on fire while he was holding them in lighter fluid soaked hands. They’ve had a couple of close scares- but Alex was always quick on her feet, shoving Ren and sending him sprawling into the water, dousing it before it got out of hand: the worst that’s ever happened was that his arms would be a little pink, tender to the touch- not quite a burn, but on its way there. 

Michael learned to pack both a first aid kit and a tiny fire extinguisher with them in the back of his pickup truck. Thankfully, ice was already something he had plenty of on hand- glassy beer bottles frosted over in the bottom of the plastic cooler. Jonas chucks a handful of plastic ziplock bags on the top, smiling as he tries to be helpful. Ren’s friend is eager to make a good impression. Michael picks them back up, and fills them slowly, drawing the seal closed, movements deliberate.

His father tries to suggest that he put the little folded things away- it isn’t like anyone’s going to be using the menagerie of boats and swans and cranes and hearts. Alex used to unfold them after holding them admiringly, enjoying the temporary art. At first, it used to take Michael tens of minutes to fold them just right, smuggling them into the dining room underneath his shirt, delighted to share in his painstaking half hour of work. Over time, he got faster, the movements branding themselves into muscle memory- but it was still always worth that chunk of time to see the way her expression lit up for just a few seconds. 

They can’t just sit out on the tablecloth forever, his father argues, next to the melting candles with white streaks of wax coagulating on the top in thick pools and rivulets: he needs to put it through the washer. It’s disgusting. There’s one for every dinner that’s happened since the incident that firmly divides his life into the before and after- a defining moment of character, a change from which you can’t go back. Even the tiny dollar sized birds stack up, after awhile: days and weeks and months worth of meals. They’ve tolerated it long enough, but honestly, Michael- can’t you be reasonable? 

Michael responds by throwing the silverware - antique, polished-patina and all, whorled with family designs - directly at his father’s head. They end up face to face, screaming: his own cheeks flushing with rage, hands balled into fists in the tablecloth. He ends up ripping it off to the side, sending everyone’s dinner flying. The wet splat of the mashed potatoes hitting the wall punctuates his exit. No one follows him.

He cuts her out of the family pictures- scissors shaking in his hands, cutting himself on the edge of the blades more often than not, and they let him, too exhausted to yell. The shredded remains of the photographs are tossed aside: years worth of himself, their father- though the pictures of their mother and Alex are left intact, carefully placed to the side, even in the frenzy of his movements. The family is too stodgily locked in their own grief, a pantomime of a happy family dinner, starchy steam from mashed potatoes drifting into their blank faces as they try to take in what just happened, exactly. Jonas swallows uncomfortably, excuses himself with a dry mouth and shaking hands to spark a lighter on the porch, hand cupping protectively around his cigarette in the cool evening wind.

He pastes those snapshots of her into a single binder. It’s a dizzying collage, of her growing up: a blur of bright hair colours and crooked grins, coltish limbs thrown upwards into the air in frozen celebration or looped around his neck, drawing him in close for the camera. His favourite are the polaroids, a little smudgy and blurred from where they didn’t develop quite properly: a too eager thumb and finger pinching them out from the darkness, wafted a little to see the moment captured: where she’s slightly out of focus from how hard she’s laughing, one hand brought up to cover her mouth. She had her Halloween coloured braces in most of them: brackets in orange and black studded across her teeth.

On the island, he hears her- hears her laughter, winding through fluting channels of the rock. It swarms around him, like biting midges from the morass of the swampy edges, thick with seaweed and rotting vegetation. He hears her crying, carried on the salt riddled winds. It reminds him of mournful loons skating across the surface of the lake, silhouetted against a full harvest moon, round and full. He hears her calling his name- a soft litany of _Michael, Michael, Michael,_ uttered like a prayer, rolled in rounds like a crescendo he waits endlessly to come to its fullest height- and stumbles over the absence of it crashing down after. It happens so often that he isn’t sure whether the tracts on his face are from the saltwater spraying into his face from the ocean or sobbing.

Jonas puts an awkward hand on him, pats gingerly in between his shoulder blades. He doesn’t say anything. There isn’t anything for him to say. Michael thinks that he might appreciate the fact that he doesn’t try- the empty platitudes after the funeral haunted him more in their perfunctory nature than the dismissiveness he got from other people: somehow, it was easier to be angry than be treated like he was about to fall apart. It was as if they were expecting it out of him, and he felt an absurd need to perform like he’d been long trained into doing- as if he was afraid that given permission, he would break irrevocably.

Michael remembers the wound up music box, cranking out plonked out tunes that have Jonas turning his head sharply to the side, tears glittering in the red neon light. It was quickly followed by the dizzying sensation of the bottom of his stomach falling out, weightlessness beneath his feet. Landing jarringly on the old wooden planks, warped with moisture and bowed from years of poor maintenance- his father let it slip to the side after their mother died. 

Alex is there, laughing- kicking her feet off of the side of her bed- asking him to stay in Camena for college. He’s shrugging her off easily: tousling her hair with one hand, ruffling it affectionately. _I’ll come back on the holidays, and it’ll be like no time has passed at all-_ he remembers saying, does say: locked into a sequence of events from which there is no escape. No matter how hard he rails against it: he inevitably finds his mouth shaped around the same words, finds his hands curled into the same gestures: finds her smiling a little sadly but giving up- the bob of her brown hair as she nods: it’ll be like no time has passed at all. Christmas will be here before you know it. Before either of them do. 

She goes swimming. She always goes swimming. The rationale always changes, slips away from him- quite frankly, he doesn’t care enough to try to hold onto it, it all burns away beneath the desperation of trying to beat her to the marina, trying to delay and stall and sprint harder than he ever has for track and field. He swears he’s broken Camena’s record for a gold first finish dozens on dozens of times over. Every sliver of a second is still never enough. He is always the one to find her, a few seconds too late: facedown in the water, auburn hair floating in tendrils to frame the opheliac scene.

Michael is always the first one to wade out into the water, ignoring the treacherous pull of the riptides. He’s gone through so many permutations that he knows how to anticipate each sucking tendril and whirlpool vortex, knows how to cut through diagonally as if he was splashing in the shallow end of the pool. The weight of her body: limp, water logged, bloated already but before the crunchy rigidness of rigour mortis, is branded on him. He knows exactly how to cradle the back of her neck to support it, how to grab a hold just behind her kneecaps. The bones stay intact when the flesh sloughs. He learned that from the sixth loop. It’s been a lesson that’s stayed with him long after- continues until the sixtieth, the seventieth- then it stops become something he consciously has to hold in the front of his mind: then it becomes second nature. 

He’s done CPR so many times that he could host an instructional class on it: lacing his hands together and forcing them two inches down every single time. Michael gets to the point where he’s finessed his control so well that he doesn’t hear the crunch of shattered ribs anymore, the wet snap of cartilage giving way and freefloating inside her chest. He knows exactly how much pressure to apply, how to time the breaths that aren’t recommended anymore, if you can only keep your focus on one at a time: chest compressions are strongly preferred. 

But after going through the song and dance more than a hundred, two hundred, three hundred times: you learn how to interweave both flawlessly, seamlessly- he remembers the weight of the officer’s hand on his shoulder afterwards, fumbling together some excuse about summers as a lifeguard. There might have been, somewhere in those loops- he doesn’t know. He’s starting to lose the composite of his own life: scrabbles at any half remembered and half conjured fragments he can.

He dyes his hair the same bright teal of the sun sparkling off of the lagoon’s water, as a permanent reminder in the mirror of that day, highlighted in surreal sunshine- and because he can’t stand the colour of his hair, of her hair- still sees her facedown and fragile, so tiny in death. He tries to drown himself in the memory of it, too.

Before he manages to rummage up the dye, a towel draped over the back of his neck and meticulously combing it into his bleached roots, he has to cover the mirror with a ratty old t-shirt, something that he doesn’t care about, something that can remain mouldering over the glass for months on end. He can’t stand the half caught glimpses of her. 

Ren is the one who evens out his haircut after he’s taken the kitchen shears to it and hacked away at it unevenly, unable to bear the length of it: tucked behind his ears, it looks just like hers. He’s silent, expression unusually closed off, as the feathery snip of the scissors darts all over, the snick of the plastic comb, the spray of the bottle that Alex and Ren bought when they were ten and looking for mischief to get into: thinned out paint splattering colourful murals around the town’s chipped brick walls. 

It’d sat collecting dust, green and round as an old ink bottle, bulbous in Ren’s hand: until he’d finally pried it out because it ‘might as well get some use.’ Michael’s pretty certain that the only other person who knows in his grief, shares in it- is Ren. He’s grown up under Michael’s same watchful eye, only a smidgen of a hair older than the two of them and lording it over in his big brotherly way- proud to be entrusted with babysitting the two rascals. He and Alex have been best friends since they were toddling around in squeaky light up sneakers and crawling around shaggy carpets, giggling as they tore out tufts like bunches of green summer grass. Ren knows her the way Michael does- keenly alive, and then a sharp absence that’s unbearable. 

This is what he remembers.

But it isn’t what happened.

Michael’s grip on the steering wheel draws Alex’s eye. His knuckles stand out starkly, pressed white against the thin skin that’s seen more than its fair share of bruising, these days. “Everything alright, bro?” She asks, reaching out to pat him lightly on the arm. “You seem a little freaked.” She doesn’t think that there’s anything seriously wrong- the levity in her voice relieves him. 

He swallows hard, looks at her out of the corner of the mirror. Michael nods, tersely. He flinches when the radio hits a spot of static, after her elbow jostles the dial. She casually spins it back, until it's on some soft pop song that he’s heard over and over again, until it's nothing more than meaningless noise- blares at top volume. His voice is soft, like he doesn’t want to startle a wild animal. He’s almost inaudible over the noise. His voice cracks halfway through. 

“Everything’s alright, now, Alex.”


End file.
